The evolution of ‘Final Girls’ in horror films.
Grace La Domas trudges down the steps of her husband’s heritage manor and settles herself down. She oversees the courtyard before her – a scenery of immaculately placed wedding seats; devoid of human activity and untouched by the filth she has endured within the last 24 hours – a stark reminder of the desolated, cold and sterile family she had unintentionally married into. Her wedding dress is soaked in blood like spilled merlot on a white tablecloth. Engulfed in raging flames, the house behind her casts an eerie light onto our heroine’s face. The events of last night don’t seem real. A sickly, convoluted blend of betrayal, shock and exasperation all wrapped under the guise of a children’s game: hide and seek. With a sigh, she lights a cigarette.
With every cut, slash and scream thrown her way, Grace is rewarded with something no one else in Ready or Not (2019) deserved to receive: survival. She is safe (for now).
Grace La Domas is a ‘final girl.’ She is not the first and she certainly is not the last.
As the name suggests, the final girl is the sole survivor against the antagonist’s violent rampage. This archetype emerged in the 1970s and 1980s with the rise of slasher films, allowing female characters a foreground to act unhinged in pursuit of confronting the antagonist that would have been negatively received in other genres. She is an audience surrogate, putting to action strategies that would silence every “I wouldn’t have done that!” moviegoer. She projects vulnerability that demands spectator empathy and is eventually praised for her resourcefulness that merits her much-deserved survival. But final girls have not always been as empowering as they are now. With an increasingly female viewership, much has changed for the horror film itself in this postmodern era. As horror movies evolve from classic, slasher flicks to hauntingly thoughtful social and existential reflections, final girls respond to political and cultural paradigms. Instead of merely surviving the antagonist killer, they enact retribution and eradicate the very mechanisms which caused the need for her survival in the first place.
The portrayal of final girls are only as good as the medium in which they are explored. Horror’s shift from surface-level slasher flicks villainizing sexual liberation to nuanced psychological-esque films with meaningful reflection of political, cultural and social complexities demonstrates the genre’s adaptability and commitment to evolving. Modern horror films such as The Witch (2015), The Babadook (2014) and Midsommar (2019) are all examples of this. Using the genre to explore social and existential fears, such as the human psyche and racism, final girls become the forefront of retaliation and retribution against a wider social commentary, as opposed to mere survival. They become a response to political and cultural shifts prevalent in society. In Ready or Not, not only did Grace kill the family that was hell-bent on murdering her, but she dismantled the entire familial tradition that instigated her ritualistic sacrifice. She becomes a symbol against excessive wealth that the La Domas family craved and represents the persecution of women within traditional marriages that upholds the institution of patriarchy. In The Babadook, final girl Amelia Vanek challenges the societal pressures against the demands of motherhood. By confronting the supernatural entity of the Babadook, she symbolises the culture shift towards destigmatising trauma recovery and grief.
Through a feminist lens, contemporary horror films are depicted as a reclamation of feminist rage that subverts a genre which readily indulges in violence at the expense of women. In these
films, final girls, who were once solely pure, virginal, not-like-other-girls-esque women, as opposed to their ditzy, sexually-voluptuous counterparts, are broadened to multifaceted victims,
virgins, good girls, bad girls, action heroes and even killers. The shame attributed to femininity in prior iterations of final girls are exemplified in her capacity, or lack of, to ‘fight back.’ If she is
not submissive and saved either by sheer luck or a heroic male figure, then she is phallicised by shedding her femininity and adopting masculine traits through the use of her phallic-like
weapons. Academic Carol J. Clover in her 1987 work, ‘Her Body, Himself’ confirms that “the Final Girl is boyish, in a word.” In Halloween (1978), final girl Laurie Strode is discarded of
traditional feminine attributes that her promiscuous female friends harbour and are eventually killed off for. In Alien (1979), final girl Ellen Ripley was originally written to be a man and no line
of the script was changed when Sigourney Weaver took on the role. Today, final girls are not confined to the assumed mutually-exclusive nature of femininity and masculinity. In Ready or
Not, Grace spends the entire film contrastingly adorning a wedding dress with an ammunition belt strapped across her midsection. She placatingly hides and aggressively fights back against her attackers. Grace is deemed attractive and is not characterised by her sexual purity. She cries in fear and screams back in warfare. She is all-encompassing in a way that embraces the androgynous aspects of herself. In X (2022), final girl Maxine is a pornstar who makes it to the end-credits, subverting the common ‘sex equals death’ trope. She adorns blue eyeshadow and battles a bloodied axe in her fight against the antagonist.
As horror films transition from ‘80s slasher flicks to contemporary social and existential horror, final girls evolve as well. From women doomed to live to women made to survive, final girls are
no longer constrained to merely defeating the antagonist through underlying misogynist characteristics. Using the genre to explore social and existential fears, the use of the final girl archetype opens the doors for multi-dimensional female characters beyond a supporting role, presenting an ultimate catharsis of female rage and an undefeatable will to live. While earlier iterations of final girls maintained semblances of campy empowerment in concurrent to its social paradigm, contemporary horror has opened the floodgates to final girls we appreciate for their nuanced relativity to cultural shifts. Or we just simply hate to love and love to hate them. Amy Dunne from Gone Girl (2014), Dani from Midsommar and Red from Us (2019) have become staple final girls that not only survive and dismantle the system that provoked their need for survival, but also teach us that sometimes the best way we can beat our antagonists is to become one ourselves.
Final girls: may we watch them, root for them and, if need be, become them.
*This was originally published in the ‘Tertangala: Horror Issue’ (2023)
Feature Image: IMDb
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